Editors Forward:
The roots of this story have been sitting in our draft folder for the last two months now, because we knew there was massively relevant information that was missing. We thought it was one thing, but it ended up being so much more that just came to light today. So I’m going to dust off the draft and finish it plus add all the new information that just broke.
If you want to skip past the part where I talk about myself over the last year, click here and it should take you to the meat of the current news.
So, it’s been a year since our last official post on here. Not a good thing, but also somewhat inevitable with the year we’ve had. Without getting too into the weeds, there’s no question that I have disabilities. And they affect a lot of my life. I had supports in my life to help manage a lot of the disabilities, but over the years a lot of them have gone. And more of them are looking to be on the chopping block, if I’m right about current politics.
So, when the Jeff Church thing blew up and my work Twitter got sent to the shadow realm by Elon, I ended up taking something of a mental health break. Still posted things from my personal account, but it was more reacting to news than reporting it. Over the summer I had some issues with my housing that was eating up a lot of my time with meetings and phone calls to get things sorted, things that didn’t completely finish until the middle of the Alissa Azar case I covered in August.
And boy was that case a doozy to cover. I think it was the first time I spent working in close proximity to The Post Millenial’s Katie Daviscourt, and it was an experience I’d hoped not to repeat (but of course that’s not to be). The bulk of my reporting in that case (which is still in an appeal status) was spent disproving the claims she and her boss, Andy Ngo, were making about the proceedings, and trying to avoid the camera of her coworker (there’s few things that Andy’s supporters like more than openly mocking a trans disabled person, even if one really missed the mark when calling me ‘Antifa Heavy Mech’, which most of my friends have agreed with me is the most bad-ass thing I’ve been called in a long time)
I’ve spent the fall and winter trying to manage my life while also helping family and the local community where I can (not a lot of mutual aid hits the Gresham/Portland border, where I live, so I’m trying to help people I know need help), and admittedly it hasn’t been very successful. I keep trying to redouble my efforts but end up falling flat on my face and sleeping for 16 hours in a day. Clearly I need the rest, but I also need to get things done.
All that is a long way to say, I know I’ve been gone, I have a lot of catching up to do, and I appreciate the people who have stood by me with everything going on in the world and in my life.
Thanks for bearing with us as we got that out (or for joining us if you clicked the link!)
A final bit of disclosure, I have met Isabel ‘Aspen’ Araujo through a family friend a few times over the last few years, and she told me about the case over the Thanksgiving holiday. That had been the last contact I had with her before her January trial date. I try my best to not let the fact that I’ve met her cloud anything that comes in this article.
The date was March 24th, 2024. Smack in the middle of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month where their beliefs state that God revealed the Quran to the prophet Muhammad (While there are several alternate spellings, we’re following the AP stylebook to use Quran through the article). A protest over the then-seven month long war between Israel and Hamas over the Gaza strip was taking place in downtown Portland, with a focus on the atrocities visited against non-involved civilians in Gaza. Approaching the protesters, holding a metal bowl with a copy of the holy book, was Sorbeah Almosa. She has described herself as ‘the most hated activist’ in her self published book under the pen name Ara Moses. Ms. Almosa sets the Quran on fire and calls out to the Palestinian vigil “Is this where the Hamas supporters are?”, parroting the disproved claim that all Palestinians or supporters are Hamas sympathizers. A figure dressed in all black tells Ms. Almosa to leave and then counts down before pepper spraying her.
Three months later, at an unrelated protest, Isabel Araujo is arrested for wearing all black and looking similar to the figure that pepper sprayed Almosa.
The case rolled on through the misdemeanor circuit, as Ms. Araujo was charged with Assault 4, Use of mace 2 (both A class misdemeanors) and Harassment (a B class misdemeanor) until November when the case is suddenly set over just before it was to go to trial. The DA’s office simply told the court ‘the victim is unavailable’.
On January 21st, the case was finally set for trial. This was the first time we’d been in court about the case, and we spent the day getting shuffled around from judge to judge to judge. A civil compromise (a form of settlement with the victim and the alleged perpetrator) had been verbally agreed to, and Ms. Araujo had done everything that was asked of her, but the day after the date was set for trial or dismissal (with a planned dismissal because of the civil compromise) Ms. Almosa suddenly backed out of the agreement, forcing the defense to spend the weekend scrambling to coordinate their witnesses.
All the parties were there, but a lot of things were missing. The state had lost one of their police witnesses due to an unspecified ‘medical emergency’, while the defense’s primary witness was only able to appear remotely due to travel issues. This could only happen with the state’s consent which they balked at. Of course, the defense similarly balked at the idea of proceeding without the state’s witness. Eventually a compromise was reached to allow the police report and body camera footage to fill in for the officer and the defense’s witness to appear remotely.
One more issue was left to be addressed: the defense never got most of the body camera footage from the case, particularly from Ms. Araujo’s arrest. It eventually became clear that there was a breakdown in process or technology between the DA’s office sending the request to Axon, who has the contract for the city’s body cameras, to release the footage to the defense and the request actually making it to the attorneys who needed it. Numerous requests had been filed by the DA but had not been completed, and more time was needed to go through the evidence for possible use by the defense before the case could go forward. The withholding of evidence by the state, for whatever the reason, is normally known as a Brady violation. Judge Brown, the trial judge, tried to work with the judge in charge of the misdemeanor docket, on setting over the case to allow review of the evidence, but as the case was set for trial that day, by law they were restricted to proceeding as-is or dismissing the case. Judge Brown dismissed the case due to the Brady violations, but did not dismiss with prejudice. This meant that the state could refile charges on the Class A misdemeanors (with the dismissal, statute of limitations time had passed to charge for the harassment charge), which they did several days later.
Along with myself in the courtroom that day was Katie Daviscourt of The Post Millennial. I have spoken at length on BlueSky about my observations of how she misrepresented the case, particularly when she posted hours after court had ended, as well as hours after I’d reported here, about the dismissal and how it was a huge unexpected surprise the case was dismissed. I called the spade the spade that it was horribly misleading journalism that was being used to perpetuate a narrative. In fact, court filings showed explicitly that Judge Brown found “the violation was due to policy in how discovery of BWC [Body Worn Cameras] recordings are sent to defense, and not as a result of any wrongdoing by the case DDA [Deputy District Attorney].” (emphasis in original)
This was where the story languished for several months since, because I knew that there was significantly more to Ms. Almosa’s involvement than was in the official record. She’d been going around the country (including a July 13th Quran burning outside a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, the city with the largest Arab American population in the US) and internationally (filming herself burning another outside the British Parliament building in October 27, 2024). I originally didn’t want to reference these, as they were after the March protest, but verifying information on book burning was surprisingly difficult for me. It could be because much of her social media presence was purged after, as she stated on her YouTube page she was “suspended from ‘X’ formerly known as Twitter for criticizing Islam”, and all of her posts on YouTube older than October 2024 have been either made unlisted or removed. The lack of available information for someone that I had known about for five years from prior protest coverage was certainly telling, but I didn’t want to cast aspersions on motives for purging videos.
But then news broke today explaining the reality of the state’s reason for delaying the trial that they made on November 20th. A police report from a week prior from Clark County, Washington stated that Ms. Almosa had assaulted her then boyfriend. The reported stated that he “has a 3 inch laceration on his face, leaving him with permanent disfigurement. Sorbeah was not located.” The report went on to state that a BOLO [Be On the LookOut] was issued for Ms. Almosa in, what Clark County was treating as, a felony assault case. We are still working to get more information on that case (our court records access is specific to Oregon cases), but Clark County court staff confirmed that she was not arraigned in that case until December 2nd for an event that happened over two weeks prior.
At this time we don’t know the knowledge that the Multnomah DA’s office had about the assault when they went to court on November 20th, or when they found out about the case. But to know that information before trial and not provide it to the defense before trial is a pretty bad Brady violation, as even though Ms. Almosa’s case is pending, and she has the same presumption of innocence as Ms. Araujo, court filings in the Oregon case state that there was ‘video footage of Ms. Almosa inflicting’ before going on to describe the assault. This evidence would be crucial to defense to impeach her character and bolster potential claims of need for self defense. The court filing even later stated that the knowledge of this assault caused even more fear and anxiety for Ms. Araujo because of the animosity towards her.
As though the concerns about the alleged victims’s behavior wasn’t concerning enough for the case, the defense continued on to make claims of the delay allowing journalism outlets to further tamper with the witness and evidence in the case. A core defense that has been raised through the original case was one of mistaken identity and the idea of how memories work. Ms Almosa claimed that she recognized the voice of the person who had sprayed her in the park that day, but had relied on video provided through the social media of The Post Millennial editor Andy Ngo. The same outlet that sent Katie Daviscourt (who I’ve spoken about earlier in this article) to cover the January trial. As part of her coverage, she got permission from the court to take photos of the defendant and her attorney, who were subsequently both attacked by Mr. Ngo in his coverage of the story (purposefully misgendering and dead-naming Ms. Araujo and calling her attorney a ‘leftist public defender’ with a ‘history of supporting anarchist militarism’).
Mixed in with the biased media coverage was something new: Ms. Araujo’s distinctive facial tattoos. Ms. Almosa claimed to police that she had seen the face of her attacker, but never mentioned the ink, and her tattoos had never been publicly published before the Millennial article in January. The defense stated they “had taken significant precautions to ensure that Ms. Almosa had not seen Ms. Araujo’s face prior to the trial date” but that with the publication of the article “Ms. Almosa likely saw this article about her case and saw that Ms. Araujo has face tattoos, allowing her to change her story and falsely claim that she saw such tattoos on her attacker”.
Further challenging the claims that Ms. Almosa has made about knowing the person who attacked her is the defense’s expert witness, Dr. Cara Laney of the College of Idaho, a psychology professor with a focus on human memory and the ways it can go wrong. She states that based on Ms. Almosa’s statements, she knew the person’s voice based on other protest videos she watched, showing “that that the identity information was a form of post-event information (i.e., information that she learned after the incident). Post-event information has substantial power to change memory.”
The filing goes on to reference a quote from Ms. Almosa in the body camera footage of her interview with police in the weeks following the attack, where she stated “I couldn’t remember that person’s name…I just got in touch with the person who put the video up, Andy Ngo, I got in touch with him and I was like, what’s this person’s name? Like what if I want to press charges? What name do I use?”
The same Andy Ngo who is editor for the Millennial, the same outlet that has been sending journalists to a number of ‘Antifa’ related cases in the Portland area for years, where candid photos of defendants and protesters have been taken and later posted to his and other’s social media accounts to generate outrage among his followers. Mr. Ngo left the US for London, England (where Ms. Almosa visited weeks before her boyfriend was stabbed). The defense states that his notable bias and his part in naming Ms. Araujo as the perpetrator makes his sworn testimony crucial to the case’s defense, but he can’t appear in person for the currently set trial date.
A hearing has been set for next Tuesday in the case, where we plan to be in person to see the outcome of this.